It’ll Probably Take Twitter a While to Remove All Those Legacy Blue Checkmarks

Twitter’s removal of legacy blue check marks is a lengthy manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, The Washington Post reports(Opens in a new window). 

In March, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that legacy verified checkmarks would be removed starting April 1, though thus far it appears only one high-profile account—@nytimes, with 54.9 million followers—has lost its verified status, after saying it would not pay for Twitter Blue.

According to former employees who spoke to the Post, the removal of verification badges draws on a large internal database similar to an Excel spreadsheet that has a history of breaking. When the database breaks, workers reportedly have to “explore workarounds.”

The report adds that there’s no way to reliably remove badges en masse, which means workers may have to remove legacy checkmarks (and those from spam accounts) on a case-by-case basis. The process “was all held together with duct tape,” a sources tells the Post. 

Musk last week defended the move to drop legacy verified checkmarks as being about “treating everyone equally(Opens in a new window),” adding that “there shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities.”

As April 1 came and went without legacy accounts losing their verified checkmarks, Musk tweeted (and then deleted) a message that said Twitter would give people “a few weeks grace, unless they tell they won’t pay now, in which we will remove it,” Mashable’s Matt Binder reports(Opens in a new window).

That appears to be why the New York Times lost its checkmark; the company said in a statement it would not pay for checkmarks on its official accounts or reimburse employees for Twitter Blue, Reuters reports(Opens in a new window). A number of other NYT-related accounts remain verified, including @nytimestech and @nytimesbooks.

Twitter, which now replies to press emails with a poop emoji, did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment. On Twitter, Musk had a similarly scatalogical response regarding the NYT, arguing that the paper’s “feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”

Meanwhile, The White House has told its staff that it won’t pay for their Twitter profiles to be verified as that payment “does not provide person-level verification as a service.”